Will Wilkinson explaining why homeschooling is
absolutely essential...while meaning to talk about something else. Quoting Nozick:
In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.
The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?
RTWT
1 comment:
Status dislocation makes a lot of people very unhappy. By this I mean the thought that:
I have quality X at the Y percentile,
Why is my status/reward level Z so much less than Y?
Fill in X, Y, and Z as you like---I've got lots of posts over on the Chariot as regards that, both in the financial and SMP/MMP spheres.
Homeschoolers at least usually get passed on a model of the world that isn't maliciously wrong, and which is usually pretty serviceable.
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